Whose Game ?Standards and their patents at 21st century's crossroads

Dr. Konstantinos Karachalios

External Relations EPO

ITU Workshop on ICT standards and IPRs

July 2008

Big Business continues to lead globalisation

Rule of POWER not power of the rules

Globalisation gets an Asian face"Within the next 40 years, some of the most major innovations will come from elsewhere – outside the west. For the moment, the west is lucky that they don’t have IP protection. But within 40 years you can imagine that the great scientific cures and great IT innovations are going to come from other regions."*

* Kenneth Cukier, Technology Editor of "The Economist"

A. Merkel's proposal for creation of TAFTA

The plan lists four areas where the US and EU should co-operate more :

• intellectual property• energy and environment• industry standards• capital markets

Fragmented globalisation

Society claims control

Technology sets the pace of change

Changing nature of technologies

“All three of the overlapping transformations that will dominate the first half of this century represent different facets of the information revolution.”Ray Kurzweil, 2006. The Singularity is Near: When Humans transcend Biology

What is FAIR ?• Renaming RAND to FRAND does not help, unless

the meaning of the term "fair" is shared by most concerned parties

• What is (historically, socially, economically, etc.) fair to the one may be seen as quite unfair to the other

• Differences in perception of fairness are at the origin of the major disasters of the 20th century (interpretations by the other European nations of Germany's aspirations for " a place in the sun")

Scenarios can build a mental set to think and discuss fairness issues from a different, not directly confrontational, black-white perspective